26.02.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 34

Anyway, all I say I personalal — personalalal — personalal — personal posi — posi — because we get to go down, walk down to the corner, we can buy — We can buy a — a — a penny candy bar for twentyfive dollars, and — and we can — we can have — we can — you just walk down to the corner and get an orange. You guys have to pick em. We just walk down to the corner, buy us an orange for twenty-five cents, plus tax, twentyfive dollars, and we get — (Laughter) And we’re even able — I think — I think — I think — like we have more material possessions, like we can walk down to the store, we can buy a new pair of shoes and — and (blows raspberry) on your capitalism and all your goddamn money. You know what — I have — I have — (Pause) I think that you’re — you’re — you’re — you’re going down to the middle of the store, it’s stupid, cause you have to waste all your money that you worked for, just to buy a stupid piece of yucky candy. It ain’t good for you anyway. But here, we can — get — just make candy — Um — Um — (clears throat) In capitalism, uh — you — you say, and our chocolate and stuff is junk, but our chocolate — and uh, and — and all the — and — and — and we have — we had — we even have signs up and — and — and stuff that even say that we help save um, you know on those cigarette packages, they even say uh, don’t smoke, and — because it gives you cancer, that’s how concerned we are about our people, and we have warehouse and warehouses full of bombs that can blow up the whole world three times over and over again, so I think we’re — we’re more — we like — we’re — and — and we — we — No, no, no — Yeah, and — and — and your whole system — I think — See, you guy say that we get — those — those — I have — I have my — I have my own bodyguards. Well, you have your own bodyguards, but in socialism, we ain’t got to have bodyguards. We can — We can go pick off the trees of our own land. We don’t have to buy like twenty-five dollars, and things like that. And you can walk down the street with tailored suits and everything, but in socialism, everybody —Right on, brother, right on, right — Okay, yeah, but “twigs are inside / us” — Rub your fingers on the TV with the sound off — right on — it should lead

to an augmentation in the number of receptor sites and an expansion of the postsynaptic receptor region, through conversion of receptor monomers into receptor polymers and perhaps some increase in the synthesis of monomers. [None of these ideas bears upon the chemical basis for depolarization induced by acquisition of transmitter by receptor. There is evidence

Along the corridor of near frequency I saw willing and discrete the season not yet for sorrow advanced, nearby not yet even so inference to claim, etc

for arguably, the “I” of the poem sees is no longer “a fair field full of folk” but an infinite series of force fields whose patterns and elements follow models of chaos and complexity rather than any principle of linearity or noncontradiction ... so a man walks into a bar, OK, in Olathe, Kansas, where a bunch of people are watching a basketball game, yells “Get out of my country!”, then opens fire. Pretty funny so far, right? But it gets better. Two of the three guys he shoots are engineers from India, but he thinks they’re from quote unquote his words the Middle East. It gets even funnier than that tho. How do I know he thinks they’re from the Middle East? Because he drives to an Applebee’s about 80 miles away, in Missouri, tells some people there he shot some Middle Easterners, and asks for a place to hide. For sanctuary. Like Applebee’s, APPLEBEE’S, is a church or something. Should I wait a minute til you catch your breath? OK. Shit, I forgot the real punchline: one of the shot men dies. OK. What? Yeah, I do have contempt for the Trump people. Hatred, really. What? No, no, no. Don’t confuse me with a Democrat. If it weren’t for Republicans, Democrats would be USAmerica’s lowest form of life. And don’t confuse me with a Libertarian or a Green, either ... OK. We are not supposed to talk aloud, or sing. Why did I say we? Iam not allowed to sing. Or rather, requested not to. Do theywatch us, no, me? With infra­red or whatever they have. They’re advanced enough in those ways. Must be something. Or how do they know when to bring in the food? Knock me out with odourless gas? No. That’s what the man over the road used to say to his dog. Die for your country! And over on his back he’d go. Caesar was the dog’s name, I just remembered. Not Tray. That’s what I thought it should be. And wherever I went, went my po-or dog Tray. Did I say dog? Back then, I had had an inchoate hope of sitting in Council with Elephants, though I had no idea what that might possibly mean. Turns out that it’s in a book about love that ends when the boy with too many donuts saves the old woman in the cellar from drowning in bad coffee. Her forehead is folded, gray and black, her nose long enough she can’t see the red dot in front of her. The word “hackles” comes to mind. Each morning the man prays to (and for) a six-foot cardboard image of the president. And we all fall down. We run toward it like mourners behind a wagon led by a camel, ending up in a rutted field beside a plain casket. These stops have been edited for narrative effect. The elephant sniffs my hands at the keyboard, my toes, the bed spread. Something always smells. Ask for the alternative happy meal. Customers who viewed this item also viewed: Wigs for your do;, Gandhi Face-Ka-Bobs, tw, live adult hissing cockroaches; and Reverse Vaginal Tightening Gel for Women. A 14th-century stone figure; broken ceramic fragments’ a Greek potter, fried eggs — “volcanoes”; thin sheet zinc and brass, etched and chased, knotted and shaped — Leave your review on Trip Advisor. One day, when the sea delivered up a fish of strange colours and dimensions, she knew the world. And so it proved. Which is to say that in a somer seson, whan softe was the Sonne, I awoke from a dream in which I was working in a medieval petrol station. Such dreams! Interests rates are rising like a boner on a Greek vase. And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city, from which all possible cities can be deduced. In all possible cities the grass is blue. It was an intricately carved piece of cream-coloured limestone with a small piece of smooth orange limestone that I managed to fit inside it. Maybe we can go vegan as a compromise. I read the motorcycle driver’s handbook while I’m at it, just in case. Because I wanted to be a drag queen. Because I wanted to be in early cinema. Everything is grey: slow descent into a warm and acrid cell nucleus, memory wearing off through scattered images whose logic is as atomized as the territories I go through. The method, because it takes the form of a diary whose structure is premeditated in order to challenge its own rules, ends up depending on resurgences that alter the physical space of the exclusion zone. I am being led by my own moves from fear into stillness, knowing every gesture traces an impossible path to be followed nonetheless. Abandoned houses face the sea and the wind in the contaminated landscape. Being there, breathing cold air, memories of an outside world slowly dissolved into the crisp reality of ... Ghosts are like vanished gods of an extinct world. Each structure is like a dark omen, a sign of disasters to come. The underlying principle is the broken desire of those who flee as far as strength allows. While the dead know in their flesh how far hell extends. Which is why, in his introduction to Will Alexander’s Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, Andrew Joron writes that Alexander’s work is “Universal History as an instantaneous burst of information ... a Signal composed of the sum total of all signals.”

In this fire of fluidic jeopardy

diamonds uncoil

& reconstruct & re-condense

like adjudicated burins

or telepathic moon forms

like psychic drafts & diacritics

being pressured by conundrum & purity

compressed below the level of the gaunt reflecting metals

diamonds

crushed & glinting pions

incessant suns in the pedalfer vapours

where the Sun quakes by quanta

by powerful interior fractals

So yes, it may be that Elephants, who are probably more intelligent than we are, can, through their empathic capacity, read the heart across vast distances, unimpeded by species barriers, and send out subliminal communications which I / we receive and respond to by coming to meet them. What does it mean? How and why are they communicating with us? What do they want? How can we meet their call?

Did we meet the Elephant people? We did. Did we apologize? We did. For what? For everything. Were we immersed in the herd? We were. Was there communication? Yes. Was there Epiphany? I don’t really know.

I mean, I don’t remember exactly but it would be something like this: in one room, there would be a giant waxen horn with a silent video showing in one end, in the next, the horn funneling toward a telephone and human actor / model (sometimes Hamilton would sit in herself) sitting motionless at a table with hands pressed downward and a coat trailing into the next, in which there might have been a floor made from old typeface packed in upwards so that when anyone entered they were literally walking on text and having that text stamped on the soles of their shoes. In short, Trout Mask Replica became less important to me over the years than did Safe as Milk. So yes, on the fourth day of my sickness I lay in bed increasingly concerned a memory I couldn’t shake: a village at twilight, uninhabited houses, several animals burning. It put me in mind of the mass incineration of farm animals during the foot and mouth outbreak that took place in Britain in 2001. You remember that? When they burnt all the animals. I remember seeing the images on TV, and saying to everyone who’d listen that Britain was in serious danger of putting a hex on itself. Obviously I was right. But it wasn’t that was bothering me. As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years, Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will no longer be visible from one another. In such a radically expanded universe some of the most basic insights offered by today’s astronomy will be unavailable. For instance, he points out that, “you can’t measure the redshift of galaxies if you can’t see galaxies. And if you can’t see galaxies, how do you even know that the universe is expanding?” Etc etc. But here’s my question: what if something similar has already happened — what if something we need to know has already disappeared? For example, could even the widely-accepted conclusion that there was a Big Bang be just an ironic side-effect of having lost some other form of cosmic evidence that long ago slipped eternally away from our view?

First, the yellow canary died, when its white cage fell down.

Then we found a pigeon’s head at the front door.

As for the rest of us, we learn something important about ourselves watching from the loading dock as the mushroom cloud announces the end of another season—

but please note, as Breitbart does, that it’s not disease per se that refugees bring with them, but “flesh-eating” disease ... “They’re coming to get you Barbara ... They’re coming for you, Barbara.” You would be too. He lives on the prison planet, encased in a thick concrete shield twenty miles above sea level: you think it’s night and it’s always been night, but those stars are just a fluorescent buzz, each constellation has its tangled wiring and a strange cloudy liquid that slowly drips from one corner, and you’ve confused the moon with a searchlight since the day you were born. Every now and then, or, possibly, at extremely regular intervals, the prisoners crisp in their cells, body fat dripping liquid through the fissures in their scoriated skin, because ... well, the weather-control stations, the mind rays, all arranged in some great chain of power that puffs out your head into a greasy sphere and makes you yell, or detail the Satanic imagery in cereal boxes and the patterns in nasal mucous when you blow your nose and oh my god the subliminals buried in those mid-morning TV commercials like if you’ve SUFfered an INjury that WASn’t your FAULT, come to LAWyers 4 YOU.